EPA: Numbers disprove bias claims

The math underlying conservatives’ allegations of ideological bias at the Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t add up, the agency says in a breakdown provided to POLITICO.

For one thing, EPA says the activist complaining about the agency’s denial of fee waivers for document requests never actually had to pay any money, regardless of whether it officially waived the costs.

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And EPA says it granted the vast majority of waiver requests he filed on behalf of one right-wing group — numbers not included in the statistics that Republican lawmakers and conservative news outlets have been trumpeting for weeks.

EPA’s figures seek to rebut Republican allegations that have tried to lump the environmental agency with the Internal Revenue Service as spearheads of a partisan, ideologically driven Obama administration. GOP lawmakers have seized on the issue, sending a slewofletters to EPA demanding an investigation of the charges, including claims that the agency routinely approves almost all fee waivers sought by environmental groups while denying and delaying waivers sought by conservative nonprofit organizations.

The gist of EPA’s response: The conservatives’ numbers tell only part of the story and don’t look at the final outcome on whether groups had to pay fees for their Freedom of Information Act requests.

But the conservative activist who started the whole ruckus says EPA is dodging the real issue: Even if they never end up shelling out money, he alleges, conservatives seeking information from the agency have to jump through hoops that liberal groups don’t.

“EPA’s response to POLITICO amounts to changing the subject, denying charges never leveled,” said Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

“At no time have we asserted that EPA is able to actually extract fees from us; instead, the law is clear that EPA is prohibited from doing so,” Horner wrote in an email. He added that the agency “persists, even to this day, with a campaign of serially denying fee waiver requests outright or by refusing to grant them, buying time and costing its perceived enemies scarce resources to appeal and, far too often, sue, to compel EPA to do what the law requires it to do.”

The agency fired back on Friday.

“CEI’s claims do not stand up against the facts,” said EPA spokeswoman Alisha Johnson. “EPA makes FOIA fee waiver decisions based upon clearly stated legal requirements that all requesters, regardless of affiliation, are subject to.”

She added: “EPA has responded to an unprecedented number of FOIA requests for CEI, and the organization has not paid a single penny to EPA for these responses. It is unfortunate that CEI continues to present a narrative to the American people that is simply untrue.”

The two sides’ numbers are starkly different.

Horner’s calculations, which have become a constant theme in the Republican attacks, allege that EPA denied 14 out of his 15 fee waiver requests when he sought information including emails between EPA officials and outside parties — a 93 percent rejection rate. Meanwhile, he said, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and Earthjustice got their fees waived in 75 out of 82 cases, or 91 percent of the time.

Horner’s numbers are far from comprehensive: He looked at a sampling of major environmental groups, a few conservative groups and his own FOIA requests.